Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    other man of his generation, was prepared by nature to break the bonds of intellectual convention upon the least possible encouragement. It was therefore of unsurpassed advantage to him that he had, in his riper years and confirmed judgment, seen, as he says, and examined all that the fermenting scientific world of France and Italy and Flanders had to offer of what was curious and new. He was able, without painful effort, to throw off, or to keep from acquiring, the mental prejudices which were typical of the strenuous, strait- ened English tradition of the early seventeenth century. As a youth, at Montpellier, he had been confronted by those symbols of the Catholic religion which it was so difficult for English Puritans of his class to put up with. But Browne soon learned to take his hat off whenever a cross or crucifix was carried past him in the street. He could not bring himself to laugh at, but was rather constrained to pity, “the fruitless journeys of pilgrims,” while ‘the miserable condition of friars ” appealed to his sympathy and not to his scorn. Look- ing back upon his years in France and Italy, Protestant and Englishman as he was, he has to confess: “I could never hear the Ave-Mary bell without an elevation,” and he tells us how careful he always was to avoid wounding the conscience of those around him by ‘silence and dumb contempt.” In all this Browne was unique in his generation. The behaviour of Englishmen in the Latin countries might certainly be considered courageous, for it often led them into dangerous predicaments, but it was not sympathetic. At Montpellier, the other English students, when they saw a solemn procession pass along the streets, distinguished themselves by “an excess B
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